At one point during his solo performance, Khalid Abdalla shows us a video he took on his phone during the 2011 revolution in Egypt. Early in the dawn light, the morning after the Mubarak regime shut off telecommunications in a bid to end protests, crowds march spontaneously through the streets, waving flags and chanting. Abdalla turns the camera around to capture his own reaction: tears streaming down his face.

There’s a lot of this in Nowhere, a 90-something minute show written and performed by Abdalla, produced by the UK company Fuel and running at the Roslyn Packer Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. The work explores Abdalla’s family and personal history, set against the backdrop of rising anti-Arab hostility since the World Trade Center attacks, and taking in the Arab Spring and the Gaza genocide.

Billed as an “anti-biography”, it’s more a collection of staged selfies, or scrapbooking acted out. For all that the show purports to cover history and memoir, the love of family and friends, and world-changing acts of violence, this is very much a production that rests on the sole performer. Whether you find it powerful or interminable depends on how you respond to Abdalla himself, and the manner he adopts.

Khalid Abdalla in Nowhere. Photo © Neil Bennett

And he adopts so much manner. It’s a shame, because there are plenty of good ideas here, and some rich material, but Abdalla gets in the way of his own storytelling. And, like the world’s worst dinner guest, he simply refuses to let up. His emoting is big; his hands flap for emphasis. He does accents.

He shows us a series of his self-portraits and leads us through doing our own – potentially a fun and worthwhile exercise, but here it comes across more as navel-gazing than an exploration of self-perception.

At several points, Abdalla lapses into silence and physical theatre that’s painful to sit through. Not quite dance, but accompanied by music and strobe lights, he gesticulates. It detracts from the emotional impact these moments might otherwise have, provoking more vicarious embarrassment than pathos.

Khalid Abdalla in Nowhere. Photo © Neil Bennett

It’s not entirely without merit. A sequence exploring the colonial history of the Baring family, extending into the contemporary, is interesting enough to stand on its own, even if Abdalla does overplay it. And the stories of his father’s and grandfather’s political activism, as well as that of his artist friend in Cairo and Paris, are fascinating and heartbreaking.

Lighting by Jackie Shemesh, video by Sarah Readman and the set by Ti Green are excellent. There are some strong choices from director Omar Elerian, with interesting use of a curtain, and – aside from an over-reliance on a mobile phone as a prop – the stagecraft is used in service of the show. There are also some interesting, albeit glib, examinations of neoliberalism and colonialism through the use of Polaroid photos, a projector and a soundtrack.

But it all comes back to the performer, and as a raconteur, Abdalla seems to be his own target audience. He’s done interesting things in interesting places, but he’s trying too hard to convince us of that.

Nowhere plays at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney until 17 January. A Sydney Festival event.